Fears of fallout from new daylight saving

THE decision to extend daylight saving in south-eastern
Australia may create a mini-Y2K by putting the internal clocks on
computers, smartphones and corporate servers out of sync.

From this year, daylight saving in NSW, Victoria, ACT, Tasmania
and South Australia will end a week later than usual - on the first
Sunday in April - and, with the exception of Tasmania, resume three
weeks earlier, on the first Sunday in October.

The change was intended to harmonise daylight saving dates
across the country. This benefits the environment by reducing
evening electricity use.

Many electronic devices with internal clocks are set to adjust
automatically for daylight saving but, as a result of the recent
date changes, the adjustments this year will be incorrect.

The fallout for regular consumers could include missed meetings
or appointments, but corporations face bigger headaches as their
internal servers, fleets of BlackBerry devices and automated
systems such as payroll, stock trading and manufacturing continue
to run under the old daylight saving regime.

Clocks must therefore be adjusted manually or via software
updates from the device makers.

A similar issue occurred in the US last year when daylight
saving began three weeks earlier and ended a week later. At the
time, The New York Times reported it would cost public
companies $US350 million ($380 million) to make computer fixes to
deal with the changes.

Microsoft has issued an advisory to users of its Windows,
Outlook and Windows Mobile products recommending they download an
update from www.microsoft.com.au that will synchronise computer
clocks with the daylight saving changes.

"The synchronisation [issue] is not exclusive to Microsoft
products. It affects all devices that update automatically
according to the old daylight saving schedule," said Microsoft's
customer and partner experience director, Hugh Jones.

The IDC analyst Liam Gunson said widespread problems could occur
if people were not made aware of the issue and did not take action
to fix it.

He said the same problems were predicted in New Zealand last
year when daylight saving changes were made but no serious problems
eventuated.

"It was really just a matter of education and people knowing
that they need to download a certain patch or look at their IT
systems, and it appears that most people did," he said.

The issue has been likened to the Y2K or millennium bug, albeit
on a far smaller scale and with less serious consequences

It was feared that computer systems that stored years as only
two digits would fail to recognise dates from 2000 onwards.

Governments spent hundreds of billions of dollars working to fix
the problem, with computer engineers predicting that critical
finance and electricity industries would stop operating and planes
would fall out of the sky.

However, when 2000 finally arrived, there were no major computer
disasters. There is debate over whether this was due to the immense
preparation for Y2K, or whether people had overstated the
seriousness of the problem.